When you are working on doing your own on-page Search Engine Optimisation at first the task can seem daunting, but there is good news: fortunately there are only a few areas that you need to concern yourself with, so here is a guide to help you make sure that you are not missing anything.
DIY SEO Glossary
- ALT Descriptions: The ALT description used to describe an image should always contain a keyword. Inserting the keyword in the Alt description strengthens your website?s SEO capabilities and if your graphic is unable to display, the reader has an idea of what the missing image is.
- Anchor Text: Constantly use your keywords as anchor text for links, including all internal links as well as outbound links.
- Bold Text/Italic Text: Any text highlighted with bold font or italic font is considered to have more weight with search engines when they are evaluating your site. However, you do want to be careful with these fonts, because too much font noise can confuse your visitor.
- Entry Pages: Spend your time optimizing the pages of your site that you prefer the search engines find. These pages are called landing pages or entry pages, and they should generously use keywords. These pages should also be the targets for all inbound links.
- Flash Animation: While it is tempting to use flash animation throughout your website, do not use it for any navigational elements. All navigation text should be keyword optimized, and flash elements are not visible to the search engines.
- Footer Links: Links at the foot of the web page should make sense. They should be relevant, and they should be easy to navigate. While it may be tempting to include more links than necessary, this is not a good SEO practice not to mention that it just confuses your website visitor.
- H1 Tags: Use keywords in your h1 tags, and your web page should never have more than one h1 tag.
- H2/H3 Tags: These tags are used for sub headings, and they should include keywords.
- Image Titles: All of your image titles should always contain keywords.
- Internal Links: These links are very helpful to a visitor to your website as they navigate their way around your site. While they carry a little SEO weight, these links should appear on entry pages.
- Keyword Phrases: These phrases are extremely relevant to visitors and search engines alike. These phrases must be included in the site content and while not overused, they must be used frequently enough before the search engines give a site a good ranking score. Always write for humans though, not for search engines.
- Meta Descriptions: These descriptions show up in the search engine results page, so it is a good idea to put a little thought into these descriptions. For more info on this .
- Meta Keywords: This field has been so overly abused that it is virtually ignored by search engines. I wouldn’t bother with it.
- Meta Titles: The title tag is equally vital for SEO as well as for website visitors. Always mention your primary keyword here. Each web page should have a unique meta title. A title tag can also include a slogan or branding message by using a pipe bar | to separate the keywords from the brand.
- Outbound Links: These links take the visitor to another website. If they are overused the search engines will penalize your site. These links do not gain you anything from an SEO standpoint, so use them very selectively and use anchor text whenever possible.
- URL Structure: Always use hyphens instead of underscores when separating words. Your main keyword phrase should be part of your URL name. However, stay away from excessively long URL names because they are inconvenient for visitors to enter.
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Tags: Google, on-page seo, organic seo, search engine rankings